[Perl-AI] Numerical attributes in NaiveBayes

Algorithm::NaiveBayes uses numerical attributes:

$nb->add_instance
(attributes => {foo => 1.7, bar => 3.234},
label => 'whatever');

Or do I misunderstand your question?

-Ken

I think you do, what I mean is that it should create some sort of
distribution (e.g. a normal distribution) of the values of a given
attribute. The naive bayes modules will (if I'm not mistaken) count the
number of occurrences of a (numeric or not) attribute e.g. in your
example you will have 1 times 1.7 and 1 times 3.234.

In weka for example the nature of the attribute is determined by the
input file: either discrete or numeric.

Right, those values essentially mean that the "foo" attribute is
counted 1.7 times, and the "bar" attribute is counted 3.234 times.
They're simply arbitrary weights, so "count" is not quite the right
term, but it's the way many people think of them.

So what you're looking for is something like this, right?

$nb->attribute_type('numeric');
$nb->add_instance
(attributes => {23 => 1.7, 35 => 3.234},
label => 'whatever');

and then the model should correctly interpolate values for unseen
attributes like 29 using an underlying distribution model? Currently
this is unsupported by the module, but it could be added - especially
with some help. =)

-Ken